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CFD Study Aims for Safer Ethanol Production

Posted Mon October 30, 2006 @08:21PM

Iowa State University has begun studying ways to replace or reduce the natural gas used in making ethanol by gasifying biomass plant material and turning it into useful energy and renewable products.

The main goal of this research is to find a way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that is put into the atmosphere and to find an alternative to natural gas, which would save possibly 20 percent on fuel costs in industrial locations.

With computational fluid dynamics, they can examine how possibly changing the gasifier in some way affects it, and see how it helps the overall product or makes it worse, said Francine Battaglia, associate professor of mechanical engineering.